UCCEL Corp, previously called University Computing Company ("UCC"), was a

data processing Data processing is the collection and manipulation of digital data to produce meaningful information. Data processing is a form of ''information processing'', which is the modification (processing) of information in any manner detectable by an o ...

service bureau A service bureau is a company that provides business services for a fee. The term has been extensively used to describe technology-based services to financial services companies, particularly banks. Service bureaus are a significant sector within ...

on the campus of

Southern Methodist University Southern Methodist University (SMU) is a Private university, private research university in Dallas, Texas, United States, with a satellite campus in Taos County, New Mexico. SMU was founded on April 17, 1911, by the Methodist Episcopal Church, ...

Dallas Dallas () is a city in the U.S. state of Texas and the most populous city in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, the List of Texas metropolitan areas, most populous metropolitan area in Texas and the Metropolitan statistical area, fourth-most ...

, Texas. Oral history interview with Sam Wyly

Charles Babbage Institute The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, ...

, University of Minnesota It was founded by the Wyly brothers (Sam and Charles, Jr.) in 1963. The name change in the mid-1980s was brought about by Gregory Liemandt, placed as

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization. CEOs find roles in variou ...

by the majority

stockholder A shareholder (in the United States often referred to as stockholder) of corporate stock refers to an individual or legal entity (such as another corporation, a body politic, a trust or partnership) that is registered by the corporation as the l ...

, a Swiss citizen named Walter Haefner through Careal Holding AG of

Zürich Zurich (; ) is the list of cities in Switzerland, largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is in north-central Switzerland, at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich. , the municipality had 448,664 inhabitants. The ...

. By 1972, the company operated a middle-sized datacenter in Troy, Michigan, and a huge facility in Arlington, Texas, based on top-of-the-line IBM/360 (and later IBM/370) processors. Uccel's "big-ticket item" claim to fame was software called UCC-1/TMS ( Tape Management System), an

IBM mainframe IBM mainframes are large computer systems produced by IBM since 1952. During the 1960s and 1970s, IBM dominated the computer market with the 7000 series and the later System/360, followed by the System/370. Current mainframe computers in IBM' ...

product for managing the

tape library Tape or Tapes may refer to: Material Tape is long, narrow, thin strip of material usually used to stick things together. (see also Ribbon (disambiguation): Adhesive tapes * Adhesive tape, any of many varieties of backing materials coated with ...

in an OS/MVS

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

environment. In 1980, they developed their second "big hitter" and most profitable product, UCC-7 (

job scheduler A job scheduler is a computer application for controlling unattended background program execution of jobs. This is commonly called batch scheduling, as execution of non-interactive jobs is often called batch processing, though traditional ''job ...

). The UCC-1, UCC-7, UCC-11 (

batch job Computerized batch processing is a method of running software programs called jobs in batches automatically. While users are required to submit the jobs, no other interaction by the user is required to process the batch. Batches may automatically ...

rerun/restart add-on) suite led the market for tape management and job scheduling. In 1986, UCCEL Corporation purchased Cambridge Systems Group, Inc., which marketed for SKK, Inc. and their market-leading

ACF2 ACF2 (Access Control Facility 2) is a commercial, discretionary access control software security system developed for the MVS (z/OS today), VSE (z/VSE today) and VM (z/VM today) IBM mainframe operating systems by SKK, Inc. Barry Schrager, Eber ...

mainframe security product. In June 1987, Uccel was unexpectedly bought out by its archrival,

Computer Associates CA Technologies, Inc., formerly Computer Associates International, Inc., and CA, Inc., was an American multinational enterprise software developer and publisher that existed from 1976 to 2018. CA grew to rank as one of the largest independent ...

, which aggressively sold directly competing products CA-Dynam/TLMS (tape management), CA-Scheduler and batch job scheduling products originally from Capex Corporation (flagship products "Optimizer" and "TLMS") and Value Software, plus CA-Top Secret (security / mainframe

discretionary access control In computer security, discretionary access control (DAC) is a type of access control defined by the Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria (TCSEC) as a means of restricting access to objects based on the identity of subjects and/or groups to ...

References

{{reflist *https://web.archive.org/web/20070927231947/http://www.horatioalger.com/members/member_info.cfm?memberid=wyl70 *http://www.samandcharleswyly.com/sam-wyly-business-industry-texas.htm *http://www.umich.edu/~msjrnl/backmsj/011397/wyly.html Southern Methodist University Service companies of the United States CA Technologies Software companies based in Texas Software companies established in 1963